Alexandra Rose Charities has a new purpose. The Rose Vouchers for fruit and veg project supports pregnant women and families living on low incomes to eat more healthily and improve their health and wellbeing. A worthy cause with a big job to do across the UK. However, there are some challenges, namely;

Marketing & operational budgets are VERY low as most of the proceeds need to go to the charitable causes

The Rose Voucher program must be signed off and contributed too by each individual borough across the UK, making it a slow process with many key decision makers.

The Alexandra Rose operational team consist of under 10 people, with already too much to do.

The good news was that Alexandra Rose Charity has a lucky break. BBC’s Inside Out program were to feature the Rose Voucher program on Monday night. However, with the reach of TV not what it used to be, we needed to figure out how to amplify that great PR even further.

Targets

Digital Willow knew that they had a window of about 7 days when the BBC Inside Out program would be watched. Day 1 was the most important live show, then the following 6 days in lesser degrees, were important as they may be watched on catch-up TV. In particular, the 5 hours surrounding the program’s live time slot of Mon 7:30 were particularly important to leverage the episode.

Furthermore, we wanted journalists and council decision makers to see our messages and be influenced enough to want to pick up the conversation and message themselves.

Digital Willow approach

Prior to the day, we prepared by rigorously with data mining detailed lists of people we wanted to communicate with. We tried where possible to obtain as much information about them as possible:

We did this by using a number of digital tools such as: SalesLoft, Hootsuite, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google.

We got a steer on the job titles and types of people who would be key from Jonathan CEO of Alexandra Rose.

On the day of the program we created a “control room” – camped in front of the TV with a person managing each of the Charities key social media accounts; Twitter account/LinkedIn and another person dedicated to creating content.

We posted social content steadily for the hours around and during the program, responding rapidly to comments, likes, shares and retweets.

We used clever targeting and a small media spend to ensure that the list of key people we had identified all saw our communications. For example; on Twitter you can target people actually commenting about InsideOut and then overlap that with handpicked Twitter accounts we had chosen.

We also created a time sensitive Google search campaign, just for the program and the 6 days surrounding it.

Results

We received hundreds of engagements (Comments/shares/like’s) from our list of key influencers. Furthermore we could even feedback to Alexandra Rose who had interacted in name so they could follow up with a phone call the following week.

Our data mining efforts resulted in 3.5 times the engagement we would normally receive across a social media program.

Traffic to the website during the 7 days rose by over 3 times.

Our Google campaign shot to position 1 on AdWords and received 3 times the click through rate of the normal branded campaign.

At Digital Willow, we work as an extension of your marketing team. Like this campaign, we can specialise in Social media advertising, Proximity marketing, display marketing, remarketing. We customise the solution to client’s brief.